Orally transmitted Chagas disease (ChD), which is a well-known entity in the Brazilian Amazon Region, was first documented in Venezuela in December 2007, when 103 people attending an urban public school in Caracas became infected by ingesting juice that was contaminated with Trypanosoma cruzi. The infection occurred 45-50 days prior to the initiation of the sampling performed in the current study. Parasitological methods were used to diagnose the first nine symptomatic patients; T. cruzi was found in all of them. However, because this outbreak was managed as a sudden emergency during Christmas time, we needed to rapidly evaluate 1,000 people at risk, so we decided to use conventional serology to detect specific IgM and IgG antibodies via ELISA as well as indirect haemagglutination, which produced positive test results for 9.1%, 11.9% and 9.9% of the individuals tested, respectively. In other more restricted patient groups, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) provided more sensitive results (80.4%) than blood cultures (16.2%) and animal inoculations (11.6%). Although the classical diagnosis of acute ChD is mainly based on parasitological findings, highly sensitive and specific serological techniques can provide rapid results during large and severe outbreaks, as described herein. The use of these serological techniques allows prompt treatment of all individuals suspected of being infected, resulting in reduced rates of morbidity and mortality.

Trypanosoma cruzi expresses mucin like glycoproteins encoded by a complex multigene family. In this work, we report the transcription in T. cruzi but not in T. rangeli of a mucin type gene automatically annotated by the T. cruzi genome project. The gene showed no nucleotide similarities with the previously reported T. cruzi mucin like genes, although the computational analysis of the deduced protein showed that it has the characteristic features of mucins: a signal peptide sequence, O-glycosylation sites, and glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchor sequence. The presence in this gene of N- terminal and C- terminal coding sequences common to other annotated mucin like genes suggests the existence of a new mucin like gene family.

La pared de doble contorno de las levaduras hace difícil que se realice la lisis para la extracción del ADN genómico en Candida spp. Existen numerosos protocolos que se basan en métodos enzimáticos y/o físicos. Sin embargo son laboriosos y relativamente caros. El objetivo de este trabajo fue simplificar la extracción de ADN para usar el homogenato obtenido en la amplificación aleatoria de segmentos de ADN (RAPD) asimétrico con un cebador reverso corto CAND R de la secuencia repetitiva de C. albicans CARE 2. Mediante choque térmico se logró obtener suficiente cantidad de ADN de las diferentes especies de Candida para reproducir los diferentes patrones de bandas características de cada una de las especies

Abstract The double membrane of pathogenic yeast make the extraction of genomic DNA difficult. The aim of this study was to simplify the extraction of yeast DNA. We report that the use of heat is an easy, efficient and time-saving technique to obtain a homogenate containing high yields of good quality DNA. The use of these technique also prevents the use of toxic components, where small traces may be inhibit the random amplified polymorphic DNA technique. Using a reverse primer (CAND-R), a sequence of 20 oligonucleotides present in the repetitive sequence CARE-2 of C. albicans, we were able to reproduce several bands patterns of different Candida species